And he would not hesitate to regale me with the gory details of whatever horrible horror movie he'd just watched.
I was uninterested. If I ever wanted to get scared, I told him, all I had to do was look at my checkbook. Or browse through the stack of unpaid bills on my desk.
But that's just me. Like Michael Binkley in Berke Breathed's cartoon strip Bloom County, we all have our own well-stocked Closets of Anxieties. Each of our Closets has different monsters within.
Still, it has occurred to me that there are certain types of monsters that commonly lurk under many lawyers' beds or in our respective Closets of Anxieties. Herewith then, for your Halloween fright, my suggested list.
Clients. Don't get me wrong. There are many clients out there who faithfully follow our well-researched, well-intended advice and who don't hesitate to honor our bills upon presentation. God bless these wonderful people. They come into our lives for a while -- weeks, months, even years -- and we help them through what they need help with and then they move on, and we move on, the better for having known each other. Maybe we even exchange Christmas cards.
But I'm not talking about that sort of client.
There are some clients who make up 10% of your practice -- and take up 90% of your time. When they don't follow your good advice, and they never do, it is somehow your fault for letting them. Or confusing them into doing whatever they intended to do in the first place.
There are clients who will challenge every billing entry, fight you over every single one, and yet, somehow, despite this exertion, or perhaps because of it, find themselves too weak to lift a pen and write you a check. Or they develop carpal tunnel. Or they suddenly go on an extended trip -- with no access to checkbooks. They also tend to suffer from amnesia; they often forget their solemn promises to pay the moment the words escape their lying lips.
And they'll withhold vital documents from you -- so you look like an incompetent, or a lying fool, or worse, to the court and opposing counsel when discovery comes due. And then they'll be offended that you're asking them, again, to give you what they should have given you when you first asked. Even if you're asking for the 37th time. And all the while they'll moan, "What am I paying you for if I have to do all this work?" And you'll bite your lip, maybe even drawing blood, trying not to say, "Well, first of all, you're not paying me...."
When you finally cut your losses with these parasites, and withdraw from the case or otherwise discharge the client, you calendar the date that the statute of limitations expires. That date will come, eventually, and go -- but the client will be forever burned in your memory, and take up residence in your personal Closet of Anxieties.
Opposing counsel. Our Supreme Court wants us to be nice to our opposing counsel. The Court even has a Commission that is meant to spur civility and cooperation among counsel. For the most part, the energies of this Commission are not needed, at least in my experience. We are all doing a job for our clients, doing our best. We understand and appreciate that our opponents must do the best for their clients, too. It's not personal. We may not be inclined to sleep together (as lawyers had to do when riding circuit back in Lincoln's day) but we are generally courteous to one another and sometimes even willing, after a long day of professional sparring, to seek out a beaker of nectar together.
But I'm not talking about that sort of opposing counsel.
There are some who graduated from the Scorched Earth School of Law. No civility commission on earth can rein in these terrors who badger, belittle, bother, and berate on every point, no matter how trivial. I recall a case in which I had an opponent who was a partner at a national, silk-stocking (or do you say white shoe?) firm. I was, he told me with a sneer, a mere state court lawyer. Until that moment, of course, I had thought it an honorable profession, but he disabused me of that notion forevermore (/snark).
He and I had to draft a protective order -- and nothing I came up with was good enough. Not nearly good enough. No matter how prolix, no matter how obscure, no matter how impenetrable the prose, no matter how convoluted the syntax, he needed it worse. Finally, after beating me up for a time he deemed sufficient, he favored me with a draft of an order that he deemed suitable. It said in 12 or 15 single-spaced pages the same thing I'd tried to say in three or four paragraphs. So when we next met -- a week or so later -- it was in the judge's conference room -- just before we were to step up and hopefully this time not disappoint her again about our lack of progress in arriving at a protective order -- I gave him back his own document, duly signed and ready for entry. I had surrendered unconditionally, changing not so much as a comma.
He took the sheaf of paper from me with evident disdain and quickly glanced at it. With a contemptuous sneer, he threw it back at me -- it was not nearly good enough, he said, not nearly good enough. (Ultimately, however, the judge thought his document, the document he'd prepared and forgotten about, sufficiently sufficient.)
Or there was this other gentleman, also a big firm lawyer. He had not yet made partner, and probably never would, because he had never tried a case. His sole job was to go to depositions and object.
To everything.
I wasn't in the room when this happened; I was in another office in the suite. But I heard it -- this guy had a booming voice -- and I later saw the transcript:
Q. What is your name?It went downhill from there.
BY MR. [LOUD GUY]: Objection. If you are so ill-prepared as to begin a deposition without even knowing the deponent's name, this deposition will be terminated immediately.
Mr. Loud Guy and the Big Firm Draftsman are in my Closet of Anxieties along with several others. They have counterparts in many attorneys' closets, too.
Judges. You might think that a judicial blogger would not have any judges in his Closet of Anxieties.
But you'd be wrong. As with clients and opposing counsel, most jurists are fundamentally nice people. All judges were lawyers once, and most of them remember what a pain in the neck the practice of law can be.
But some either never knew or seem to have forgotten. There are a few of these in my Closet of Anxieties, too, along with their unrealistic deadlines, usually in cases featuring uncooperative clients. There's a natural force at work here somehow, something like magnetism, only much more malignant.
I could go on... but then you wouldn't need to buy my book, would you?
I think a lot of lawyers have the first draft of that book they've been meaning to write since forever tucked away in their personal Closet of Anxieties. In my Closet I suspect Mr. Loud Guy and the Big Firm Draftsman take turns reading passages from this yet-unwritten book. The one finds everything in it ojbectionable; the other finds it not good enough, not nearly good enough.
Happy Halloween.
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